Visits

Recently one of our Ph.D. students (Nikos Lampadariou) visited the Natural History Museum of London through the EU's Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme. These funds have been made available to provide access to European (and Associated States) researchers to undertake short visits to utilize the facilities of the Natural History Museum (NHM) and its associates for research purposes. In our case the aim of the visit was to study the Mediterranean free-living marine nematodes and compare them to well known species donated to the (NHM) collections.

Although marine nematodes have been overlooked most of the time, they are one of the most widespread and abundant groups of animals. They are present in sediments that extend from the tidal reaches of marshes and mud flats and the spray zone of open beaches to the abyssal plains. In and on this great variety of sediments and surfaces of the intertidal and benthic environment, they are often the most abundant metazoan in numbers of species and individuals. The extensive description of free-living nematodes began in the latter half of the nineteenth century from Bastian's "Monograph on the Anguillulidae". From 1910 to 1950 there appeared numerous records from various regions of the world, but the beginning of the modern science of free-living marine nematodes was marked with Wieser's works on Chilean nematodes. Although a lot of work has been done worldwide since then, our knowledge on nematode associations in the Mediterranean and particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea is still very poor.

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